Genetopia (27 page)

Chapter 25: Amber’s story

“Flint! Flint!”

The woman who was now called Taneye but once had been Amberlinetreco Eltarn, hurried along the overgrown track. The roar of the rapids nearby reminded her always of the risks, although her son frequently wandered and had never yet come to any serious harm.

She paused, and looked for movement. Butterflies and the scarlet glint of a tree frog were all that caught her eye.

“Flint?”

She saw him scampering away, head of thick chestnut hair bobbing above a screen of woodrush.

She knew a shortcut and so she sidestepped into the trees, finding a straight line to the path’s kinks and curves.

She waited behind a tree and when she saw him approaching she leapt out from her hiding place making animal roars. Flint was too young to be frightened by her antics and he collapsed on his tiny rump, laughing at her and pointing.

“Flint, darling, you shouldn’t run off like that,” she chastised him now, stroking his thick hair.

His expression suddenly changed to one of childish anguish. “But Nana Herrel said–”

“Nana Herrel said nothing, and you know it.” But she knew what he meant. Herrel could be stern with the pups at times and equally Flint could be over-sensitive.

“Is it true?” asked Flint now, shifting subject with ease.

“Is what true?”

“Denny and Mereck says the Tallyman gets you if Nana Herrel don’t be liking you. They says the Tallyman shouts so loud... says he eats children.”

She took him in her arms and hugged him tight. “Denny and Mereck like frightening little boys,” she said. “They should know better. Anyway, Nana Herrel loves you, darling Flint. And there
are
no Tallymen here: we’re safe here.”

It’s not the Tallyman you should fear, in any case.

~

She woke in the night, in the cabin she had grown with Herrel while baby Flint had taken root in her belly.

They lived in a small community on the slopes of a great mountain, where the forest gave them a living of abundance. It was a peaceful place, the happiest she had ever known. A good place to raise her son.

So why, now, did she dream of the past?

Flint’s words, she supposed: fears of the Tallyman.

The Tallyman comes

in the dead of the night.

When the Tallyman comes

you’d better take fright!

Back in the land of the True, her son would not have survived to his Naming Day: he had the high, domed skull of one changed before birth–changed deep inside. He was a sensitive child now, one gifted with insight and smartness way beyond his years. He was like a little Oracle, she often thought.

Perhaps he had sensed something, now, found some kind of understanding, knew of change to come.

She turned and tried to find sleep again, never at peace with her thoughts in the darkness. She had known too much darkness in her life.

She thought, then, of Leaving Hill. All the bones glinting white like chalk in the sun. She used to wish she had been left there as a pup. It would have spared her much.

But those times were long gone now.

~

She found little Flint on the main trail that ran across the flank of the hill and down to the river.

“You mustn’t keep running off like this,” she chastised him.

But he just looked up at her, smiling in his impudent way. “You
always
find me, mama!”

She sat down with him and took his hands. “I used to run away,” she said. “When I was a girl. I had a lot to hide from. My mother and father did not love me as I love you, Flint. Do you understand?”

Solemn, Flint nodded. “I’m not really running away,” he told her. “I’m playing. That’s what children do.”

Maturity and impish cheek. He could be so exasperating sometimes...

Suddenly serious, Taneye went on: “One time I really ran away. Or at least I tried. I was very unhappy, with parents who mistreated me and a brother who found me a burden. I went to Oracle. Do you know what an oracle is?”

“A smart pod grown to understand,” said the boy. “Melody says the True use them because they don’t have minds of their own.”

“I had decided to run away and I went to Oracle and that was where I decided I would go to Greenwater to visit my Aunt Clarel. She hated my father–her brother. She knew what he was like.”

“What did you do?”

“I went back to my room to get some of my things. And my father, Tarn, was there. I told him I was going. He said that just proved that I was not True–that no True daughter of the clan would do such a thing and that I was no daughter of his. He said that if I was going then he might as well sell me like the mutt that I was.”

“He did that?”

She nodded.

“He was a bad man. He spent most of his time being angry with the people in his life, the women in particular. It is not uncommon for the True to banish clan members who turn out to be changed. They leave the pups out to die and they trade the older ones into slavery. Tarn arranged with his cousin Mesteb to sell me to traders. I expect they drank the profit between them.”

“Are they far away?” asked Flint now. He looked scared, and she remembered that, despite his air of oracular wisdom and understanding, he was still only an infant–one who could be frightened by stories of the Tallyman.

“They are very far away,” said Taneye. “All of them.”

~

Flint ran ahead of her, on the trail down towards the river. He liked the white water, where the river tumbled over big, rounded boulders, kicking up spray and foam and making an almighty roar. He liked the shapes and the sounds, he often told her: never the same, always changing. He could stay by the river forever, if she would let him.

She kept a watchful eye on him, as he ran and skipped ahead of her.

By the river, their trail joined a larger track, and she saw two small groups of travellers passing on their way. She hurried to catch up with Flint.

He was squatting, holding two stones in his hand.

When she joined him, he looked up at her, childish wonder in his dark eyes. “Look, mama,” he said, holding the stones up to her.

She saw that they were two pieces of a single stone, cleaved in two. Rough on the outside, polished on the inner, the two halves fit together almost perfectly.

Flints.

This stone did not occur here naturally. Someone must have brought it with them...

She looked around, saw an old woman approaching.

“Luah,” she said to the woman, holding one of the stones up towards her. “Did you see who...?”

Luah pointed along the trail and Taneye turned to follow her gesture.

A man walked away from them. A slim figure, dark hair in bunches down his back, a bag slung across his shoulder.

She thanked Luah, took her son’s hand, and hurried along the river trail after the man.

Chapter 26

He had seen much, the man they called the storyteller. He had travelled great distances, but whatever it was that he sought seemed to be beyond his grasp.

He had found people who spoke only in song: tunes that he sometimes appeared to recognise and could hum, but the words of which he did not understand.

He had slept in the trees with mutties, had allowed them to groom his hair and beard, had eaten blood grapes with them and shared in their dreams and visions.

He had visited communities of the Ritt and the Ten. At some of the former he had been welcomed as a wise man, a traveller and healer, and he had told stories to their children and remembered an old Riverwalker who had done likewise, many years before. At the latter he had been threatened and stoned, and had on several occasions been lucky to escape. There was fighting in the Ten, he knew: humankind versus destiny. There could only be one outcome in such a conflict but they did not like to be told.

Out here, though... out here there was peace. The many kinds of human welcomed him, and so he travelled farther, deeper into the lands he had once believed to be bad.

Seeking. Always seeking.

~

He sat on the bank and watched the movement of the water, the endless variation of contortions and folds in its surface. He could sit like this forever, it seemed.

A woman came to him, holding the hand of a child who was clearly her son. The two had the same chestnut in their hair, the same yellow in their dark eyes.

He nodded in greeting and then returned to his contemplation of the water. There was a solidity deep in his belly as he saw that the water moved with smoothness and continuity, a reflection in nature of the Lordsway.

“Flint?”

He looked at her again, and saw that the boy was looking at her curiously, too.

“It is you, isn’t it, Flint?”

And then, finally: “Amber?”

~

He sat in the sun, in the open area to the rear of the podhut Taneye and Herrel had grown. He laughed at something the boy said to him, and then turned as his sister came out with food.

She stopped, just a little awkward still, fingering the rivershell bracelet on her wrist.

“I found you,” he said to her, now. He indicated the building, the boy, the village beyond. “I seem to have found much more, too.”

She moved to him and kissed him on the brow. “You always find me, darling brother.”

“Where...” he said. “Where is this place?”

She smiled. “This is Harmony,” she told him.

They ate and drank, and said little.

“What will you do now, Flint?” Taneye asked after a time.

“I could go back,” he said. “Now that I know you are safe. I can pass as True, you know. They just think I am mad. I could go back and help spread the change. All those so-called truebred humans living in terror of the future...”

“They would destroy you.”

“I would destroy them,” he said. “Or, at least: I would
change
them.”

Then: “I came to take you home,” said Flint, eventually. “That was always my intention.”

“This
is
home, Flint.”

She was right: this Harmony was where the true humans lived now. And home was spreading all the time.